The Harmless Ramblings of Brad Trent…

The 2016 Barron’s Roundtable Extravaganza – Part One

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As anyone who has visited Damn Ugly Photography on a regular basis knows, the first week of January is when we decamp for the warm embrace of the Harvard Club to shoot the annual Barron’s Roundtable. This year was no different, and apart from there being a few familiar Roundtable members missing and replaced with a couple of new guys, the formula remains the same. We have two hours to shoot each of the nine Roundtable members…separately since they all arrive at staggered times…with the objective being that we need enough varied poses to fabricate four individual covers (three in January and one more for the mid-year report in June) as well as four feature photos to open the story with each week. We start at around 8:00AM and have to be totally done by the time the meeting begins at 10:00. If the thought of shooting nine people for four covers and four openers in two hours isn’t daunting enough, we also have to get each Roundtable member to wrap their head our concepts for the covers immediately…and remember…these aren’t models. They’re financial professionals. Trying to get them to understand the varied poses I need so that I can manufacture a cover where they all look like they’re relating to each other is harder than any of the technical tricks we work on!

So here is how the shoot for the first week’s cover went…

Our Week One cover and opener revolved around this image of a World Map…

Using some old images of the Roundtable members from a previous shoot, I put together this comp…

…so when people arrived, I could quickly show them a visual representation of what we were going to do…

As usual, we have to set up multiple lighting sets for our different poses in a very small room…this time we had three individual sets…

…everything is in the same place…hair & makeup, three sets and a very small area where people can hang out until we get them on set…

For the cover, we wanted everyone to react to the people around them…people who weren’t there when we did the shoot…so Robert got to carry on imaginary conversations to get each persons attention aimed in the right direction…

We did luck out once when Bill Priest and Brian Rogers overlapped, so we shot them together…

…but for the most part, they had to wave their hands around like a weatherman in front of a green screen…

So my raw materials from this part looked like this…

Now I just had to pick the appropriate images where everyone looked like they were all together at the same time. Here’s how the cover got pieced together…

First, the base background image…

Next, the base image is flipped to make the floor, and I also de-focussed it so it looked more like a real reflection…

Now I could mess with the color & contrast for the combined background…

…and add a few people…

…and the rest follow…

…and finally, I added shadows and more color & contrast tweaks…

…which gave us our cover for Week One…

Now I could move on to the inside feature image. I stated with the same base image layer, but I destaurated the blue cast a bit and lightened the upper area so that we could overlay type onto it easier…

The inside poses needed to be a bit more serious, due to the recent instability of the markets…

The ‘assembled’ group…

…the final image with shadows & color alterations…

…and our opening feature image…

So that was Week One. Tune in again next week to see how Adrian Delucca, Pam Budz and I put together Week Two & Week Three!